Andre Moore isn’t exactly a brain-surgeon, he’s pretty much a fucking moron, he was tossed in jail after he posted a youtube video that allegedly incited violence against the police in Filthydelphia. One of the charges, aggravated assault. What the fuck? Let’s take a step back here.
Andre is/was a security officer at a medical center in Philly, and evidently had a beef with the Philly police. As an outlet of his obvious red-hot frustration, he posted a hate filled video that promoted violence against the cops. A quote from the video (click here for full article):
When you shoot the cops, you shoot them dead
I’m not sure that qualifies as aggrataved assault. Here is wikipedia’s definition of aggravated assault:
causes such injury purposely, knowingly, or recklessly in circumstances where the person has exhibited indifference to human life; or
attempts or causes bodily injury to another person with a deadly weapon.
In another stroke of moronic genius, Andre the fucktard had his 12 year old son film the video. So slap on a corruption of minors charge.
My problem with this is obviously a free speech issue. Is Andre a despicable person? You bet. Are his rants and rages protected speech? Hell yes. If we allow our government to decide the line between protected and unprotected speech, then we are on a very steep and very slippery slope with a bunch of bible-beating book burners waiting for us at the bottom.
I wonder, should they have arrested Ice Cube, Easy-E, and Dr. Dre for “fuck tha police”?
Ice Cube will swarm
On any muthafucka in a blue uniform
Just cuz I’m from the CPT, punk police are afraid of me
A young nigga on a warpath
And when I’m finished, it’s gonna be a bloodbath
Of cops, dyin in LA
That shit is protected too, and fucking NWA rules.
Say it isn’t so, our bullshit government has engaged in propaganda activity directly on US soil? The New York Times had a very interesting article yesterday titled: “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand“. No, the hidden hand wasn’t up Bush’s mostly retarded ass as I had originally guessed, it is actually in your pocket and mine, as well as up the skirts of school girls (the Pentagon is a dirty dirty place full of creepy pederasts). The article is a great read and goes into detail how the Bush Administration uses former military officials, who are now mostly tied up with the private sector defense industry, as embedded puppets at the major TV news outlets. Big surprise, FoxNews had the highest number of these ass-clowns followed by NBC, CNN, CBS and ABC. One warning, the article is fucking 11 pages long, most of us don’t have the attention span or time to dedicate to an article that long, but it was worth the extra minutes for me.
We all know suspect that the information flowing from the Bush Administration is bullshit, but now there is solid evidence of an information tampering program initiated by the assholes in charge of the country. They brought these “independent” analysts in and held private briefings with them with the exact message points the administration wanted to get out and then deployed them to the networks. And this shit works.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
I really fucking hate this administration. And, I’m not sure if our government is realistically fixable.
The wife and I saw the film Stop-Loss this past weekend. I had never heard of the term stop-loss before I saw the movie, it is basically the ability of the US Army to involuntarily extend a soldier’s enlistment contract past the initial end of service date in the time of war. That is where the rub is, we haven’t declared war on Iraq, we have a nebulous war on terror (it might as well be a war on cockroaches or martians). Overall it was a decent movie, it won’t win any awards, but it definitely gets the message across that our soldiers are getting fucked in the ass on this one. When I say fucked in the ass, that isn’t just with the stop-loss, it goes for the whole nasty mess the assholes in charge of our country have gotten them into. There is a decent comment thread about stop-loss on the movies blog site here, comments are mostly from military men and women. I will leave you with a poignant comment from a soldier that is currently being stop-lossed:
I am grateful a film is out about the Stop-Loss issue. Many of us have been “Stop-Lossed†and sent back to Iraq after our contracts with the Army have been fulfilled. Some of us never came home. After having served my country for 11 years, it is shameful that we, as soldiers, are subject to imprisonment if we fail to uphold our end of our contracts with the US Government, yet it is perfectly legal for the US Government to not uphold its end of the bargain. We all accept and do what is required of us while serving our country. But when our “time is up†and “duty fulfilled†they force us back and demand more. Personally, I believe that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and former Secretary of Defense Rumsfield, should be held personally accountable and legally charged for the death of every soldier that was deployed under Stop-Loss. We did our duty, now let us go.
A man was charged with disorderly conduct in Doylestown, PA when he put an obscenity (the big F-word) on the memo line of the check he used to pay a $5 parking fine. Evidently the clerk who processed the fine was offended and the rest is history. Let me get this out of the way before I rant… FUCK YOU DOYLESTOWN! Ok, now come and arrest me assholes. From the article (Click here to read full article):
Clerks were offended by the message, and the disorderly conduct charge was filed because the comment was obscene, police Chief James Donnelly said.
“He was contrite enough to offer an apology, and I think that satisfies the people who were insulted by it,” he said.
So much for free speech… great now we have to worry if we offend somebody, which pretty much makes me fucked in all 50 states. Sorry, screwed in all 50 states, is that better? But at least they dropped the charges because they were “satisfied” with the apology. So what would happen if they weren’t satisfied? I wrote you a check Doylestown.
We should celebrate freedom of speech in this country, instead we devolve into politically correct bullshit. On the extreme other side of the spectrum of the free speech debate is the Klu Klux Klan vs. the Missouri Department of Transportation. In this case MODOT denied the KKK’s application to enter into the adopt-a-highway program, the KKK sued and eventually won when MODOT lost an appeal. I agree with the KKK in this instance (even if they are ignorant douche-bags) based solely on our rights of free speech. The best part about this story is, MODOT changed the name of the highway to “Rosa Parks Highway” in a bit of a “fuck you” to the KKK, good for you Missouri. It turned out the KKK were dropped from the program after all, when they never showed up to clean up the highway, I guess you can’t teach assholes new tricks, or get lazy racist rednecks out of their trailers to pick up trash.
There is a new Ron Paul grassroots fundraising event planned for December 16th. This time it is to coincide with the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, which I think is more appropriate than the blowing up the parliament thing from the last event. The goal is the same as before, get 100,000 people to contribute 100 bucks each to raise $10 million, the last event raised over $4 million. Again as with the event in early November, I was planning on contributing in December anyway, so this was a no-brainer for me to join. Spread the word if Ron Paul’s message is attractive to you, and don’t if it isn’t. Link to the site here: (Tea Party 07).
As I discussed a couple of days ago in my post “Iran as a threat… et tu Blair”the current administration and the military industrial complex (MIC) is ramping up its pre-war rhetoric which has an end-game of aggressive action against Iran. Cheney has been the latest to deliver the solemn news and a firm warning to Iran as reported by CNN.com:
“Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions,” Cheney said in a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Studies.
He said Iran’s efforts to pursue technology that would allow them to build a nuclear weapon are obvious and that “the regime continues to practice delay and deceit in an obvious effort to buy time.”
If Iran continues on its current course, Cheney said the U.S. and other nations are “prepared to impose serious consequences.” The vice president made no specific reference to military action.
“We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Cheney’s words seemed to only escalate the U.S. rhetoric against Iran over the past several days, including President Bush’s warning that a nuclear Iran could lead to World War III.
Please take a moment to let those strong words from Cheney and Bush sink in. Is this the legacy that Bush is looking for in his lame duck years to capstone his Presidency? World War III? I can’t imagine why else they (the Bush administration) are pushing this agenda.  The Bush administration must really have no respect for the collective intelligence of the American people if they feel they can continue to deceive and manipulate information toward a goal of further war. They must be completely convinced the American people are idiots and won’t recognize the pattern. This is pathetic and it makes me sick to my stomach.
The TSA announced yesterday that it was loosening up restrictions on bulky head-wear and turbans no longer necessitating a search (unless the aforementioned head-gear sets off the metal detector). I found a gem of a quote in an MSNBC article discussing the change:
Experts say mixing up the screening techniques is good security. “We must use security measures that are unpredictable, agile,” TSA Administrator Kip Hawley told a Senate panel Tuesday.
What a total crock of shit. Since when has the TSA been “agile” or anything short of reactionary? All of the current annoyances amount to nothing but gross incompetence and lack of vision, i.e., taking off your shoes, limiting your gels and liquids, taking out your laptop, no matches/lighters, taking off your bra in public (yep they have made people do it), etc etc. None of these measures were pro-active or based off of intelligence, they were reactions to loonies.Â
First it was smoking bans, seat-belt laws and a myriad of seemingly benign legislation bent on controlling society at the cost of your personal freedom. Now it is baggy pants. Yep, baggy pants. Are you serious? As if there isn’t enough going on in our world, let alone our communities, that baggy pants are an issue. All across the country these types of legislation are either in place now or in the proposal phase. The elected officials are attempting to make a positive correlation between baggy pants and crime. Here a couple of blurbs from a recent ABCnews.com article on the subject:
“If we have kids going around wearing pants below their butts, it’s not nice, not decent,” says Timothy Holmes, a city commissioner in Opa-locka, Fla.
In Atlanta, City Councilman C.T. Martin says he’s trying to raise standards and instill values in today’s youth.
“Bill Cosby started this conversation, and we let him down,” Martin says, referring to the comedian’s controversial criticism of the parenting skills, grammar and values of poor blacks.
Laws like this are extremely dangerous, I agree with Cosby, it goes back to parenting, you can’t legislate your way out of this. Just because you wear a mini-skirt, it doesn’t make you a whore, the same goes with baggy pants (the crime part that is, not your inclination to be a whore).
I’ve been following this story and the expected media hype and have held my tongue until it played out. The following excerpt from a CNN.com article today explains the schools verdict on the situation:
“We see the editorial as an opinion which is protected by the First Amendment,” Landers read.
However, Landers said the board found that the editor had violated the school’s ethical standards.
“We feel that it caused harm to The Collegian and to student media. It is our judgment that his actions were unethical and unprofessional,” Landers said.
This is a surprisingly well thought out judgement, typically free speech issues are very emotionally charged. In my opinion, the FB guy intended a free speech dialog/debate as a reaction to the “article”, he succeeded. However, he could have picked a better topic or even A topic, the FB guy really wasted a golden opportunity here to take a real stand on a real issue, he still could have told Bush to Fuck-off, but for Christ-sake make it count.
On the other hand, he did cause harm to the paper in terms of advertisers pulling out, this should have been planned for as a negative reaction was inevitable. The FB guy and the paper could have mitigated this by lining up advertisers that are pro free-speech. Again, all he had to do was pick a real issue to make a stand on.
As a gross generalization, we Americans have become numb to the erosion of our civil liberties. One of my biggest pet peeves are the passing of legislation put in place to “protect” us from ourselves. The simplest example of this are the seat-belt laws. On the surface this makes sense because everybody knows it is safer wearing a seat-belt. But, do we really want the government to dictate safety to us via legislation? What’s next, getting a ticket for being a dumb-ass? (Which is basically what the seat-belt law is about). There is no crime here and there is no victim. If I want to be a dumb-ass, why can’t I? (I have plenty of practice) This is a slippery slope that we are on and the government is slowly but surely chopping away at the remaining liberties we possess.
Finally, popular opinion has won out over individual property rights, and people no longer have the power to decide what types of otherwise legal activities they will allow on their own property. What a great day for individual liberty!!!
I’m not sure what the answer here is, but maybe it starts with everyday people asking the right questions, like “why?”….
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